Wireless LANs used to (some still do) rely
on Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) protocol - that uses 40 bit encryption.
This is not strong enough encryption in today's environment. This code can be broken in
a day or less by a good encryption hacker, according to University of
Berkeley's research team. The following schematic from eWeek (February 12,
2001 issue) shows how this is possible.

IEEE 802.11i - More durable
standards based security solution. The standard will be approved in
late 2003 with vendors building products to comply with it in 2004
in our estimation.

Interim Solutions: a number of
solutions have been proposed by different vendors. Some of these are
described hereunder:

Atheros (A chip vendor) AES
Solution - Atheros is to include AES (advanced
Encryption Standard) in its next generation of chips. Atheros
builds chips for 802.11a, 802.11b and 802.11g. AES is in
firmware. Eventually will require chip upgrade.

Symbol Temporal Key Integrity
Protocol (TKIP) : Will require upgrade in future when
802.11i is implemented. Symbol has announced a scaled-down
version of TKIP called Mobile Computer Mode (MCM) for handheld
devices that can not handle full-fledged TKIP..

You can expect future versions of
Palm OS (Version 5) and Microsoft Windows CE (powering Pocket PC
devices) to have integrated security built into the OS itself. You
can expect system-wide 128 bit RC4 encryption in Windows CE and a
security authentication/authorization framework for Palm OS version
5.